Piers Morgan & Hugh Grant feud rears its head as UK general election looms

Election jitters may have triggered Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan and actor Hugh Grant to attack one another on social media, but a deep-seated grudge is keeping the fight going.

Grant and Morgan’s long-simmering loathing is back with a vengeance, taking the political feud personal with evergreen references to phone hacking and public sex convictions.

Morgan opened the can of worms, singling out Grant by name in a tweet pooh-poohing the pre-election surge in celebrity instapundits calling on their fans to “vote tactically.” While he was technically responding to a clip of actor Steve Coogan whining that “the future of the country is at stake” because of right-wing populism, Morgan widened the scope of his scorn to include Grant, slamming the “stupefying pomposity of these clowns trying to thwart democracy.”

Grant was ready with a barb of his own, reminding the journalist of the phone-hacking case that saw Morgan’s Trinity Mirror Group pay the actor a six-figure settlement over charges that reporters working for the now-defunct News of the World hacked his voicemail. Morgan has maintained he and his employees were innocent of the illegal information-gathering, but the corporation admitted wrongdoing.

Morgan hit back with his own blast from the past, recalling Grant’s public lewdness conviction (and posting the mugshot from the actor’s 1995 arrest, which the journalist clearly has saved somewhere easily accessible on his hard drive – it invariably makes an appearance whenever the two tangle on Twitter, and Grant threw back a few news articles on phone hacking (his Twitter account isn’t @HackedOffHugh for nothing).

Ironically, the two celebrities seem to agree on their distaste for Conservative PM Boris Johnson, who was so eager to avoid an interview with Good Morning Britain that he hid in a refrigerator truck on Wednesday and has generally made a habit of physically avoiding reporters’ questions. Grant had his own reasons to throw shade at the PM after he shot an election ad parodying a scene from the actor’s 2003 film Love, Actually.

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